transparency in my reporting.

Eh, why not? This is my Japanese language blog*.

I've been hesistant to post a link here because I suffer from the universal condition of all gaijin. A mixture of pride and self-conciousness about my language ability. There's always a sense of competition about Japanese for some people, me included. It's almost a knee-jerk reaction both to correct other gaijin's Japanese, and to loathe the gaijin that do it to me.

But if I keep carrying some sort of concealed shame about my linguistic shortcomings, I'm not gonna get past them.


*My studies are still very much a work in progress, so if you can read Japanese, I apologize for the terrible grammar and writing. The content is generally pretty awful too. I set myself a standard of 500 characters a day, so it's been a push to write as much as I can, more often than not. I also still don't have very much breathing room in terms of vocabulary. Very often, what I say is shaped by what I know how to say. If I were to say the same things in English they'd probably come out a lot differently. Still, enjoy.

shoot the fucker down

I was just reading an article about the new Japanese global imaging satellite, after another from a couple weeks ago about an international initiative to restrict the use of space to "peaceful uses".

So a thought occurs to me. America has expressed it's intentions again and again to build the "star wars" satellite defense system, to the loud objections of other countries. But if America were to decide to build it, there would be nothing to stop other countries to shoot it down during it deployment-phase. Meaning the project would have to be conducted in utter secrecy, without congressional or voter approval.

The president has been known to think of this "wartime" government system as granting him whatever power he desires to "combat terrorism". Is it possible that the deployment is underway already, or soon to be underway?

If that's the case, would the chinese and russians not have a reasonable case for shooting down american satellites, knowing that they could well be "dual use" satellites?

I have a feeling that if America doesn't straighten up and fly right, china, russia, and to some extent japan and europe as well could become involved in dangerous satellite sabotage and espionage.

That's just a thought though.

NHK

Do you pay your NHK? Does anyone? (besides me)

I just read a little editorial on the state of affairs at NHK, and it looks like change is on the way. None too soon if you ask me.

The number of non-payers is an enormous and growing burden on the broadcaster. The whole world seems to know that not paying for NHK doesn't really carry any penalties, and consequently, they don't pay. NHK is looking at all the possibilities they can to figure out how to make people pay, but it's pretty clear the only viable option is to institute a penalty for not paying.

What gets me about the whole debate is what it shows about the contemporary culture of responsibilty. Several years ago, people were almost equally aware of the lack of penalties for non-payment, but paid anyway... out of a sense of duty. Several weeks ago, when I decided to pay for NHK, my office was insistent that I shouldn't pay, even if I do watch. Other people I've talked to as well think it's borderline insane to pay NHK.
We're leaving the Japan of prior eras, when duty to the society overshadowed personal well-being, to be sure. And that's a good thing. But I worry that the new Japan will build itself on top of the words of Horie sha-chou "If it's not illegal, it's ok". Or even worse, seeing as not paying NHK is indeed illegal, "it's ok, so long as you don't get caught"... the Huser ideology.

(update: I'm not entirely sure on this one, but I think the Huser thing may actually be something more like "the penalties are lower than the profits to be made in breaking the law")

up 569 points ftw!

the nikkei index pwns joo. Livedoor losses are now totally offset, and the dow is a bitch. Japanese market at its highest in over 5 years.

in other news, ftw does not mean "fuck the what", but "for the win". Fuck the what!

a rolicking good time for the whole family

I've watched three movies in the last three days. "Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room", "Untergang" and "Nobody Knows".

None of them was rolicking, or a good time for the whole family.
All three were quite good... though untergang was probably only good because I haven't practiced my german in so long. All three were also drawn out stories of downward spirals into death. "Nobody Knows" in particular was stiflingling sad. Great, really great, but nauseatingly sad at a couple points.

streaming level two on keitais.

e*trade japan offers streaming level 2 market info on keitais as of today. Orders can be processed for as little as 472 yen. I thought amateur trading was easy and populist when I was with e*trade US in 99-2000. my mind = blown.

in other news, I am in the market and losing money as of today! w00t.

seems like I should mention that Horiemon got his ass hauled in today. It's not a matter of "if" any more, but how much, and how much will the investors have to bear? as though it were ever a matter of if... My overly optomistic take is still that this is the best for the market. If we had to spend a whole year worrying about this insignificant player, the market would stand to lose a lot more than if we put that unpleasantness behind us as soon as possible.
The market never favors democracy and freedom. This time too, the expedient and secretive courts are going to help out the economy. Seems like I should have some compunction about being in the market knowing that... maybe.

the worst kind of blog entry.

the worst kind of blog entry is the entry that consists of nothing more than a link to an article that you liked. This is that kind of entry.

"The Stock Market" by Mark Cuban. I feel redeemed in knowing that I've felt the same about the market since 1998 as one of the most successful men in it.

re: two top singles from last year.

this shit is bananas.

this is just shit.

I don't really like either of those songs, but "since you've been gone" is just terrible. The only redeeming part is the midi sounding guitars throughout the whole song... no wait, it was the sub-avril chorus... no that's not it. Was it the utterly inane lyrics? The singer's unconvincing bleating?

Oh yeah, it's the guitar bridge lifted directly from Maps.

There was an interview with vanilla ice about the "under pressure" sample where he explained it something like:

The original was "dun-dun-dun-du-du-dun-dun, dun dun-dun-dun-du-du-dun-dun" whereas his version was "dun-dun-dun-du-du-dun-dun, tchk dun dun-dun-dun-du-du-dun-dun". So it was an orginal creation.

(had to get the "since you've been gone" hate off my chest.)

worrying about the monbushou scholarship, and my dark past.

Lately, every night, just before bed I remember that I did nothing about the monbushou scholarship today either. Everyday, that feeling is a little worse. But the application isn't due until the middle of the summer. Granted, I've got a lot of work to do between now and then but this worry is out of proportion to the problem.

Then it hit me.

In 1996, and 1997 I made a damned big mistake twice. Two times I let too much time pass to make a proper application to college. Consequently for two years, I was out of school, and getting dumber and lazier by the minute. Where I ultimately wound up was also the direct result of postponing and postponing.
Submitting rushed, sub-par applications to my real school of choice, Reed, got me admission (twice!), but didn't get me enough money to actually attend. (family equaled very broke) Not taking control of my life at that point, and not accomplishing what I know I could have is my single biggest regret.

Having that happen again is just an unbearable thought.

Today, I wrote to the SF consulate.


(ps, even seeing the reed website just now gets me queasy with regret)

I hate this cold.

a book so good I bought it twice.

Today I was out shopping in the aforementioned super-mini-mall plaza out on the edge of town (a bitch by bus). Walking from one of the buildings to the other, I took my first tumble of the year. It was a full-on, "feet go up, butt goes down" kind of fall. It didn't hurt, but there's always a sense of disappointment with the first fall of the season. I'm always holding out for a miraculous perfect season.

But this time, it wasn't just the shame and disappointment. Evidentally, the book in my pocket also flew out. I was reading "the wind up bird chronicles" in Japanese (*coughSHOWOFFcough*), so I figured it wouldn't be such a big deal to pick another one up. Besides, it was only 500 yen.

I was right, it wasn't a big deal... for me. In most Japanese book stores, paperback books are sorted by the publisher, and then the author. So I had to ask the staff of the book store. They looked at me like I had asked for a quarter pound of plutonium. When they figured out that I meant a japanese edition, they first showed me to the hardcovers. I asked about a "paperback" edition... and things got confused. The japanese word probably isn't *pay-paa-bakku*, but I figured book store people would suss it out. wrong-o.

It turned into classic Japanese frantic-search mode. One staff member got on the phone to ask about it, and was getting transferred to and fro (by people who were probably also being thrown into frantic search mode). Another started searching on the computer. Another... well he went to deal with other customers. Still, there were two people looking when I figured I might as well take a look at the spines of the books since I was pretty familiar with how mine had looked (the paperback publishers use recognizable spine designs). It took me about 8 seconds to find my book.

I look forward to a future where japan begins to lay things out logically. But, maybe I'm a dreamer.

(don't get me started on the video store where they sub-categorize drama into a million tiny pieces like "human drama" and "crime drama" and "romance".)

ambitious uppity japan

I like what I'm seeing out of japan lately; I like it a lot. Last night, Koizumi told the sloppy american beef exporters to fuck off after they slipped an explicitly forbidden cow spine in with the "good" stuff. This week, when the market went bananas, the foreign press moaned and grumbled, and then the japanese market had huge up day, completely out of pace with the grumbly global media. The demographic problem is more and more often phrased as an opportunity for Japan to show the world how it's done, rather than a crisis because we can't keep up with denmark (likewise fossil fuel prices). Hell or high water, Japan wants a permanent seat on the UN security council.

All around, Japanese culture has always resisted completely assimilating, but this year she's going well beyond that. Japan is acting like the world's second biggest economy, and not playing ball with global consensus. The BSE stuff is a small but symbolic effort to step out of the shadow of America... to turn America back into a customer instead of a boss. So long as America can politically wedge open the door and force in it's inferior, infected beef, Japan is a vassal state.

I think a whole bunch of economic and cultural flowers could bloom if Japan were to assert itself more in global politics and economics.

("ambitious japan" was a weird, largely contentless, ad campaign over the last few years, celebrating japan's ambition)

fuuck you, Ernest Hemmingway.

God, is Hemmingway boring. I started to give him a second chance after the "for whom the bell tolls" debacle, but about 20 minutes into listening to "a farewell to arms", he's blown it.

If you wanna be carried away into a very prosaic world not unlike ours, but minus all the relevance, I suppose his books are acceptable. For me though, he just doesn't go any farther than being a travel writer, travelling in places where the trees are "brown" and the roads "muddy". He conjures no beauty, truth, feeling from the landscape, or characters. They just interact in ways that don't have even the humanity of a Sopranos character.

That and war and manliness are just the bottom of the barrel of boring.

keitai sunset

keitai sunset
Originally uploaded by notnato.

For all my scattershot griping and blabbing on about the stock market, you might think I wasn't as happy and content as I've ever been.

You'd be wrong.

impulse engines.

You wouldn't believe how well I've handled my money for the last week. Today was payday, though, and my discipline is slipping. Today I bought, on impulse, a pan lid, a 1.5L bottle of coke, an 88yen bag of chips, instant mushroom pasta, powdered cheese pasta sauce, a bottle of water, and a 5 piece "cheese-potato" from DonDon. Not really that bad.

The real money vanished in a different way. I transferred a huge sum of money to my brand new e*trade japan account. It was a strange feeling to look at the screen of the atm and know that if I pushed the "yes" button that my savings would be decimated instantly. I pressed it anyway. I also had to make two seperate transfers, so I had to pay 1260yen in fees... only slightly less than my impulse shopping for the day.

Tomorrow, I steal a page from Mary's book. I'm going to get up early and take a bus out to the Showa Daibutsu. I don't know how it looks covered in snow, but I will soon. I'll try to get some pictures for sharing.

why they hate the consumer?

AU announced their fancy pants new music player cell phones today. The coolest model has a 4 gig hard drive attatched. But knowning the music biz like we all should by now, I held out my excitement...correctly.
Alongside the new keitais, they premiered their new music download service for keitais! Which is to say, that it don't matter what you do, that $30 cd of yours is not going into this keitai. There's still no keitai out there that lets you use your own music (I think). Bastards.

They even pretend to sweeten the deal by allowing you to back up your downloaded songs on your computer. Again, knowing what I know, I think that means they've created a non-Mac compatible piece of software that is so invasive of your systems processes that they need not fear you actually being able to "back up" your music to CD. If this were the states, I'm almost sure we'd be looking at Sony Rootkit part 2.

But speaking of Japan not giving a shit about the well being of it's computers... I imagine this country is teeming with viruses on their computers as well.

wrong, wrong, wrong

huh, the tokyo market is going crazy up today. I guessed wrong, I suppose. That doesn't really bode well for my investing acumen, though going up in general increases my odds wihout acumen as well.

edit as of 2:30... the tse is warning that volume may force them to close early today as well. Somehow if more than four million orders are executed in a day, the infrastructure runs a risk of compromise... or some such. seven or eight million orders placed (not executed could also mess her up).
also, "for the forseeable future", the TSE has trimmed a half-hour from it's day giving traders 2 full hours for lunch now. What is this, a mediterranean country?

edit again, at 2:32, both the order and execution capacity are at over 90% of their daily limits. This mess is all sort of an embarrassment for the TSE, except the normal trade volume　for a full month is only slightly more than the daily limits. Volume of orders is just off the charts. This is unmistakably a bumpy ride.

one more edit: CNN needs to work on how it writes headlines. "Japanese securities official dead" while it certainly is more flashy, does not have the same meaning as the first line of the article: "An executive of a Japanese securities firm involved in takeover deals by the high-profile Internet startup Livedoor has been found dead".
People caught in pretty bad misdeeds still commit suicide in Japan, and this may be a fishy death (prolly no), but a high ranking executive is not a "securities official". The livedoor stuff is actually an example of the securities officials getting off their asses and doing their job. Not a suicide-worthy shame.


One last thought on the market for a while... Even though I don't even have cent in it yet, the silly intricacies of market politics are already consuming a good portion of my blog. Money does eat your soul. Then again, I'd probably only be staring. at the. ceiling. otherwise.

conservatism is heavy. I grow heavy.

I've felt recently like modern "conservatism" is built on a belief that the world is impossibly black and irredeemable... like the conservative refuses to afford an ounce of trust to the world. Conservatism is dismissive of any and all dreams that aren't grounded in greed or deception. For the conservative, there is always a counter example that justifies treating the world with hatred. Like the coldest of men are the greatest of men.

I think the world drives us all in this direction. Tragedy after tragedy, violation after violation accumulate as we age, and we lose out trust and brightness.

In today's news is one of those tragedies that makes the world blacker and heavier for me. Today, the otaku murderer guy from the late 80's was given his final, unappealable death sentence. The black part is that I'm quite happy about it.
I oppose the death penalty, pretty strongly. I don't respect the authority of the state to control the literal life and death of humanity, nor the ability of the courts to determine guilt and innocence without flaw.

This guy, though, I'm glad to think that he will die unpleasantly, and at the hands of the state.

oh dear. down 3%

I certainly didn't think the market would tank quite so badly today. Much more than the tanking of the market though, the really troubling thing was the early close. Today was the first time in the history of the TSE that the market closed early.
The market driving computers were evidentally overwhelmed by the number of orders. That the were tons of orders being pushed through is, I think, a good thing. The market had already lifted a little off of its daily lows, so the volume of orders was likely caused in part by people snapping up perceived bargains.
But shutting the market down is a terrible thing. The TSE had another outrage regarding the market-infrastructure in december when a single order was beefed up. The number of shares and price of shares got switched, and the order was carried out. This further trouble with the infrastructure will not be welcomed by the international investment community. (which incidentally makes up over 70% of the market cap of the TSE).

Even worse though is the fallout from the underinformed individual investor. These two days of crash belong almost entirely to the individual japanese investors being spooked. Now, the market choking on volume of orders will sound royally shitty to the gut-reacting housewife daytraders. I can't imagine tomorrow will be a good day.

However, it is a matter of live/die by the sword/irrational indivual investor. I wonder how long they're gonna stay spooked.

shit

待って。日本のテレビでもshitが言えないの？今ロンドンハーツで女の人が言い出したとピーップになった。
Oops. I meant to put that on the J-blog, but it's interesting anyway. Just now on London Hearts, they seem to have censored the word "shit" from the mouth of a Japanese woman. Or maybe it was fuck. Either way, it strikes me as odd to take out foreign language swear words.

the first 4 books of 2006

So far this year, I've read two books and listened to two audiobooks. None leaves me all that impressed. Here are haiku reviews of each of them.

IBM and the Holocaust

"IBM was bad."
'Sall the author had to say,
in five syllables.


For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemmingway,
if his works were sold today:
men's airport fiction

Diary

Not boring, not fun.
Spooky rural rituals,
from Chuck Palahniuk.

Lizard

Japan before nate.
Like boarding a time machine
to 1990.

horiemon the impaler!

As the japanese love to do, investors in internet stocks in Japan took a bath today. The whole market saw an almost three percent drop on only marginally important news.

Horiemon (Horie Takafumi) charisma-free talento and leader of the livedoor companies looks to have choked. His fanatical zeal to pump his companies stock price at all costs has brought him right up to the edge of the law time and again, drawing plenty of detractors along the way, but not slowing livedoor's market growth. Well, now the cops are all over his shit, and whether he's guilty or not, investors are spooked. Trading on livedoor is frozen, but even largely unrelated internet stocks like softbank and rakuten are down as much as 10%.

The newsmakers are saying that it has to do with investors faith in the new economy companies being shaken, and I believe it. But I also think that the prevailing trend will not be destroyed by this one piece of information. It may take a few weeks, but before long the nikkei will recover it all back and then some.
I'm just glad it happened before I managed to get my money into the market. That's a little later this week.

kiss iya

I'm watching a weasely-ass canadian dude trying to convince his japanese girlfriend that it's ok for him to cheat while he's in canada. A-ha! She didn't buy it, and under pressure he made a hurried vague semi-proposal. Things will not end well for these young lovers.

Note to Japanese women. If you're dating a gaijin dude and he doesn't really seem to be making any progress on understanding the language, and he does not understand japanese culture, he is not considering a future in Japan... or with you, most likely. He's dating you because you speak english, but are still the local flavor.
Please don't learn english for the men. They're not worth it.

T. Adorno: musicologist, philosopher, blogger

I mentioned before that I'm reading Minima Moralia. Today, something struck me about the format of the book. It looks like a blog.

There are single paragraph and longer entries, on a range of topics, without specific cohesion. For example one entry might be be concerned with the practice of psychoanalysis as brainwashing legitimized, while the next would be something like: "remind me to never talk to lindsey agian [sic]. She is such a cunt".

The 150 parts all have numbers (in place of dates) and witty titles like "paysage" and "This side of the pleasure principle" or "Signs that say what you want them to say until they say what some car manufacturer wants them to say".

It's full of complaining, and hell, he even wrote the entries during a hard time in his life (WW2). What's more, his hardcore band even has a myspace page now.

Indeed, he was an emoblogger before his time.

i express a moderate automatic preference for gay people over straight people.

I also strongly dislike Bush as Compared to Clinton, and have a slight automatic tendency to associate women with family and men with work.

What about you?

urban renewal, aomori-style.

Apropos another yomiuri shinbun editorial...

Aomori city is on the cutting edge of city development. In one limited sense.

In case you hadn't heard, the population is decreasing. If you read my blog, you've heard it and heard it and heard it. Aomori city is not immune, of course. So Aomori has been working on a plan for the last several years that really is having a nice effect.

The plan is the "compact city" (コンパクトシティー）. Owing especially to the local climate, a sprawling city is difficult and expensive to maintain. Public transportation and snow removal need to cover a larger and larger area as time goes on. So Aomori, knowing that the future holds fewer taxpayers to support vast public projects, has been actively pursuing a plan to keep the city nucleus alive.
Like the rest of the world, japanese downtowns are suffering as huge discount stores with enormous parking lots are driving the business out of the city core. In an already poor, and expensive to maintain city like this one, it's an absolute necessity to prevent that.
That's why there's a (semi-)beautiful library right in front of the train station, and continuing development like the (luxurious?) new mid-life tower apartment building directly in front of the station. The city has been working through tax incentives and other means to bring businesses to the eki.
Attracting the youth and the economic activity they bring to the area has been the priority, but I wish they'd find a way to attract more youth-friendly cafes. Or me-friendly cafes at least. There's still no starbucks, even though they would likely make a killing.

There are a couple of thorns in the side of this plan though. The interminably long kankou doori and chuuo doori keep stretching further and further to the south, in spite of the decreasing population. As of November, all three of the major electronics stores in town are out in the far reaches of these two streets. They're all actually quite close together. The new denkodo/xebio/tsutaya complex out in that region also seems to have potential to drive customers away from the city center. Though it's not so far away from the city as to pose additional maintenance burden. The region was already somewhat well serviced.

The biggie isn't coming for a few more years though. In 2010 when the new link in the shinkansen reaches aomori, it'll stop way way out of the city core, in a region that is not currently well serviced. But I'm sure they've got a plan.

Anyway, Aomori + compact city plan = good shopping all in one place. Thanks, city planners.

taste:

People aspire towards "higher" cultural forms and produce their identities accordingly – they want to be associated with those who are considered to be more developed intellectually and artistically and therefore tend to consume corresponding cultural products.

That's from wikipedia's "sociological" definition of "Taste" as described by Bourdieu. I came across it as I started opening tab after tab in Firefox (which I admit does not actually suck). Originally, I was trying to dip my toe into "Minima Moralia", and I wound up drifting off into the vastness of the internet. Little did I know that I would get a stern little internet talking-to about why I was reading minima moralia in the first place.
Frogs be damned, I'm still gonna read above my edu-socioeconomic status. Now what was that about the scandalousness of the economic state of affairs...

500 characters a day.

My blog entries are likely to thin out a lot more from now on. After the previously mentioned crisis of confidence, I've decided to go back to working full-bore on my Japanese studies.

In the next couple of weeks I will know whether or not I passed the JLPT, but I already know that I didn't really deserve to. At the 1kyuu level, the test is supposed to prove that you can read a newspaper, and function in a Japanese university. To be honest I am quite sure that I can do neither. I've got a lot of work to do before I can read a book at an even remotely reasonable pace, and a lot more to do before I could ever dream of writing a proper paper in Japanese.

So I've turned back to my japanese blog. I set myself a goal of 500 characters a day, but that's a lot more than I had thought. For now, forcing myself to use 500 characters and not having a good reign on vocabulary means that I write insanely vapid crap (as opposed to what appears here?). Over time I hope to tune up my grammar, and vocab and write something that I don't mind providing a link to. For now, no link.

So content here is gonna dwindle. Probably.

spooky rural rituals.

I finished listening to "Diary" from Chuck Palahniuk last week. It wasn't really that good, but I've been hurting for entertainment a bit lately (note "staring. at the. ceiling."), so I've started listening to some of the zillion audiobooks I have. But that's beside the point.

The story was about one of those spooky rural communities and their spooky recurring rituals. The Lottery, and The Wicker Man are another couple in the rather large genre. It's a pretty fun genre too. Contrary to most literature it doesn't edify simple farm livin' over education and science...usually. When it does make a critique of enlightenment thinking, as in the case of The Wicker Man, it stays morally ambiguous.

Do these exist in Japan? It seems like there probably would be a few horror movies about this sort of thing. Being a ritual happy, countryside lovin' society with intimidating masks and drums and flutes and stuff it would be a pretty cool concept. Jeff! Get on it!

staring. at the. ceiling.

January/February's really not my best time.

speech contest translation.

This is a speech contest entry that I translated last August:

“It’s urgent Miss Watanabe. You need an operation right away.” When the doctor said these words, I felt like the world stopped.

Last summer, I went to the surgery ward for the first time in my life because I wanted to have a lump in my breast checked. The nurse drew my blood and took some X-rays. When the results came back, I was shocked. The lump was a tumor, and I needed an operation to get rid of it.
On that day, I didn’t feel like talking with anyone. I felt terribly depressed and all I did was just lie in bed. I couldn’t believe the doctor’s words. From the time I was admitted until the surgery, I was overwhelmed with regret, anxiety and countless questions.
“If I’d known this would happen, I would have taken better care of myself.”
“I should have come to the hospital earlier.” I told myself.
“…and general anesthesia! If I catch a cold, I could die!”
“Why should such a terrible thing happen to me?” I asked myself.

In that depressed state, my friends were the one who cheered me up the most. They sent me a letter that told me what was going on in our school. Some of my friends visited to encourage me.
“Are you OK?” they asked.
“I’m sure that you’ll be able to come back to school soon.”
“Are you worrying about the lessons you missed? I’m not such a good note-taker, but you can use mine.” they told me.

For the first time in my life, I wished I could be in class. I wanted to see my friends; I really wanted to go to school!

Then I came to realize something: how wonderful it is that I can live an ordinary, healthy life. Good health can’t be taken for granted. It’s terribly fragile.

That’s why I want to live for today, every day, without regret.

passion.

So I didn't like Kingdom Hearts II. But I have in the meantime really fallen in love with the theme song from the game: "passion" by (of all people) Utada Hikaru. I normally imagine myself quite immune to the charms of slick j-pop. I can enjoy a bit of the overly poppy stuff now and again, but this is different.

This is pure 90's overwhelmingly heavenly vibe, turned up. Think Sarah McLachlan's "Sweet Surrender" passed through Orbital's live version of "Halcyon and On and On". Add in a little "Mummer's Dance" while you're at it. Plus, the bonus point for me of being in largely intelligible japanese. I really am crazy about this song right now, and therefore really am a big old dork.

But speaking of "largely intelligible japanese"... I'm in a phase with Japanese where I still don't recognize clichés. So even pretty cheesy lyrics aren't robbed of their impact by failing to meet some standard of cleverness. In fact, cleverness is a pretty big disadvantage for me, since I don't really have the means to get puns.
I have been in this phase before too. With german. There, and here, no matter how jaded I am on the products of my culture, if they're translated into the local tongue, all my defenses go down.

Thus I like dopey japanese and german music. But god help me if I ever imply that I like french pop music.

criplling self doubt/ player hate.

sunrise
Originally uploaded by notnato.

It's not often that I get all livejournally around here... but just this once, ok?

There are a couple of blogs about Japan that I read regularly, with really different perspectives on things, marxy and momus. I comment (a little too) regularly on both and have some dialogues back and forth with the blog protagonists from time to time. They both seem like really fun people.

But beyond their blog contexts, both are pretty impressive people. Momus has travelled the world making a cosmopolitan living on his art, and is 90% of the time, a really fascinating thinker. Marxy, well he's still young, but he's just finished writing his (marketing or commerce) masters thesis in japanese, and has relased 1 album with another on the way. He's also the recipient of a monbukagakusho scholarship for his graduate studies in Tokyo.

Like I mentioned before, I'm interested in these scholarships, and getting an even higher education in Japan. Both for the sake of a future in Japan and for my own purposes. So I've been running around the internet today looking for whatever information I can find.

So tritt die Selbstzweifel ein. I just don't think of myself as on that elite level in any regard. Looking over the application forms for the monbusho scholarships, I can't help but think of how I compare, or don't compare. I can be proud of my writing or japanese language ability or aptitude in whatever particular field in isolation, but put it on the table to compare to folks who are really getting it done, and I lose all confidence.

In simpler terms, I'm a player-hater.

Breaking my ass last year studying japanese and working on all manner of self-improvement has made a difference, but I'm still uncomfortable with competitions I won't win easily. Let that be the goal for the coming year. Stop the player hate.

trend over.

Is it just me or is the mini cool hunting revival from last year over and dead?

I think blogs were the perfect format for cool hunting, but if too many people are working on pushing too many different things over the tipping point, none of them has any meaning anymore. "Cool" packing it's bags and getting the fuck out of America probably has a lot to do with how square those sites are starting to look. That and the end of the mono-chromatic "design" regime of cool. It was like everything aspired to be eames for a couple years.

save what's left/ semi-anti-momus.

Whoa man. Some days it feels like the biggest thing I accomplish is folding up my futon and putting it away. I'm looking for something to keep this day from being a total waste, but the flesh is weak, and the mind unwilling.

I've just had too much vacation lately, and too much time spent in my apartment. You might have noticed the million words I've written in the last week.

But that brings me to something about momus' take on Japan. At every opportunity, he likes to point out how easy-going and relaxed Japan is. How the japanese like to eat and sleep and have sex and drink. Sure, all those things are true. But time after time he seems to be working very hard to ignore that most japanese head-of-households work a lot. Like 60-80 hours a week every week. They don't wear street fashions, they don't make dainty little crafty things, they don't have sex very often, they don't sleep enough, and they don't really watch the food shows either.

Momus' image of Japan, like an increasing number of westerners', is based on a highly-consumptive, non-earning class of youth. He, and lots of others imagine that Japan and the japanese economy simply function based upon some magical principle of shinto, that requires nothing more than a steady stream of pretty submissive girls.

Tokyo is full of suits for a reason. Business is still the engine of this culture. The common-man still leads a relatively miserable and unfree life, and it's his toil that directly subsidizes all of this indolence (my own included). It's his voluntarily-diminished humanity that enhances all of ours.

For me, this is why momus will always miss the mark. He may be very right about the nice-ness of the part of the elephant he's touching, but he ignores far too much. I love this place, probably as much as he does, but ignoring the mundane, and deliberately looking past the toil that has defined and will continue to define japanese life is "no good".

when there are lots of jellyfish, it will be a snowy winter.

Evidentally that's a little proverb they have around these parts. And evidentally, it's true.

Lots of jellyfish is a folksy indicator of warm seas. Warm seas mean more water vapor in the air, which means more snow. It was a big summer for jellyfish, and it's a been a ridiculously snowy winter all along the Japan Sea.


(This is also yomiuri newspaper stuff. Being able to read the newspaper has really opened up a different world to me. Maybe it's not that interesting really, but I really like having the option to get the same news and opinion as everyone else around me.)

But back to the jellyfish... The short article I read (once again) ignores the elephant in the room. Why are the seas warm? The extreme rains in Northern California, and this year's record setting hurricane season are also closely connected to ocean temperatures. What could be making the world's seas so warm so suddenly? It's a real mystery.

kitaaaaaaa

My etrade new account kit arrived today. Monday's another holiday, but come Tuesday, I'll mail it off and the process will be well underway. Hopefully they'll move quickly too, and I'll be on the way to losing huge sums of cash by the 20th.

114.475, go, yen, go!

Actually, although part of me wants the yen to be strong against the dollar, I have no plans to exchange any money at all until May. Word on the street is that since Japan is a big exporter to the states that a strong yen will hurt the economy more than help. So maybe don't go, yen.

8% of my love*

*a song from "square one".

How much love is Japan giving it's stock market? (I know that's what you reall wanna hear about.) Not much at all. In America, 50% of all personal savings are invested in the stock market. In Japan? 10%.

Yep, a paltry 10%. While 50% may not be the right number for Japan, increasing individual investment in stocks would benefit the economy greatly. I could bore you with an even more uninteresting, and probably way off the mark discussion of the liquidity trap, but no. Suffice it to say, making the money move, and play a role in the economy rather than just sitting in savings accounts would benefit Japan.

Again, I'm writing about the new yomiuri editorial. The thought there is that in order to get people's money into the market, there needs to be more security in a market investment. Not that the investment needs to be safe, but that laws need to be clear and simple, and that transparency and disclosure need to be stressed. I'm not keen on the idea of "clear and simple" laws (often code for easing tax burdens on the wealthy), but his specific ideas aren't really that important to me.

What's important is that this is yet another sign that the media is gonna stand by this idea, and keep encouraging people to get their savings into the market over the next few months and years. Another sign that I didn't mention here was the M&A (mergers and acquisitions) version of "the game of LIFE" I saw for sale a couple weeks back.

In a sense this collaboration between the media and the government to enact social changes is disturbing. It's really only a different shade of the media-gov't collusion that brought America to such a state of fear that it is willing to sacrifice it's every freedom to protect it from the seemingly omnipotent "terrorists". Except, frankly, Bush's social reforms have made America a weaker and worse country, whereas Koizumi's have the potential to make a stronger, better Japan.

I can see! I can see!

I went to the optometrist yesterday. They made me look at far away things with one eye covered, then close up things with one eye covered. The examined the inside of my eyes, and then took a picture of them. They stuck these weird paper tabs under my eyelids that protruded like 3cm eyelashes, and made me sit for five minutes. They made me try on the worlds ugliest glasses and read for 10 minutes. Then they brought me into a back room and told me that everything seemed fine, and I wouldn't need glasses. My eyes were probably just worn out from computer use. Woo Hoo!

I had been worried because the glasses actually made reading easier. What they did give me instead of glasses is a perscription for "vitamin" eye drops that should help my eyes a bit. Thing is I'm not sure I can get them in. I'm supposed to use them four times a day, but the minute I get the bottle tilted up over my eye, I get really creeped out by it all. The whole concept of eyedrops (and contact lenses) is gross to me.
On the first try, I just missed my eye by a mile...

Update! second try got caught in my eyelashes and didn't go in...

third try was a charm, but every bit as horrific a sensation as I expected. It's like getting hit in the face with a ball... except you know it's coming.

an opinion machine! regarding universities...

So, again, Japan's facing a crisis of not enough young people, and not enough baby-making. The government and people are willing to discuss two ways to deal with the finicial crisis that arises from having too small a workforce.

1. create more tax revenue.
2. create more babies.

To someone like me, they're rather obviously ignoring the elephant in the room....

3. increase controlled immigration

I mentioned in 2 + 2 that having a pretense for selecting rich/elite immigrants is nice (if not kind). Japan understandably doesn't want a wave of impoverished, unskilled immigrants who may not learn the language and customs. Germany knows the problem.* How better to control the immigrant population than to assure that all of a certain type of immigrant be college-educated and fluent in Japanese?
How do you do that? Well, you've got your universities slowly emptying out; you've got increased global awareness of and interest in Japan, Japanese language, and Japanese technology; you've got a reasonable history of investing in international exchange...

Follow the model of Sweden or of Germany. Make the public universities free, or very, very cheap for citizens and non-citizens alike. Do this, while maintaining reasonably high admissions standards, and poof! A whole generation of talented youngsters from all around the world are here, speakin Japanese, learnin how to live Japanese, and (providing intelligent immigration laws) stayin' around and makin new babies and new money.

Has it worked that way for Sweden and Germany? Well, yes and no. Cheap university has drawn innumerable talented foreign students, as well as opening higher education to a broader stripe of the populous. Many, of course are staying. But if they stay, they often bring their extended families, with no knowledge of the local language... or they send a great deal of their earnings home, and out of the national economy.
In both countries, other forms of immigration have also brought in waves of immigrants as well... so they have not really been able to maintain societal integration to the extent that Japan demands. Immigrant ghettos are a growing problem.

Still, I think properly managed, this is an opportunity for Japan to take the reigns on immigration before it becomes totally necessary to bring in foreigners en masse to keep the economy alive.

OMGWTF BEST EVAR!

I know you're all hoping for another entry about the banal systems of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but right now, an

OMGWTF BEST EVAR!!1!!

is in order.

(teh context)

curiouser and curiouser, TSE

boring stock market related entry!

I mentioned a couple oddities regarding the Tokyo Stock Exchange earlier, but I was missing out on the biggest one. On days when the market is open, trading is in some sense (I'm still trying to parse out what sense) is interrupted from 11:00 to 12:30. Consequently, there are two opening and closing prices each day.

Also, in lieu of the regular after-hours trading I was used to in the states, there's a strange "auction" that occurs at both opening and closing. For all I know, this also occurs in the US stock markets, but it sure as hell doesn't ring any bells.

Since I know my regular readers are very enthralled with the machinations of the Japanese stock market (sarcasm-face!), I'll try to update this entry when I finally parse out what's really going on with these two phenomenon.

Update!
Well, the auction question is answered here... about as enlightening an answer as I could hope for. And, yes, the stock market really does just stop. That auction system is used at both of the market openingS, at 9:00 and at 12:30 to determine stock prices.

I think the stock tradin' folks need extra time to go stand in rilly long lines for the popular ramen-ya of the week.

2 and 2

whoa. how did I miss this realization.

I've talked before about JET's "real" purpose being to encourage young foreigners to love japan and japanese culture so that when they return home, they will happily buy japanese products and gladly create economic ties with japan.
I totally missed the other possibilty for these pampered foreigners until now though. Some of them are bound to love japan enough to want to stay, and make cute little haafu babies. These people help in a very small way to combat the dropping birthrates, but more importantly, they allow japan to import carefully selected foreigners. All jets have college educations, after all. They aren't the criminal rabble that might otherwise trickle in through economic-opportunity based emi/immigration. Plus they'll all have a few years of good experience so that when it's time to really enter the workforce they won't be scared off.
This would seem to be the sort of foreigner I am.

There was a cartoon I saw over the break that featured a poor man feeding mochi to a rich man's rat out of generosity, and the rat brought him the rich man's money. Maybe there's a recurring cultural theme of providing much more nuturing circumstances for others in general as well.

non sequitor.ne.jp

hmm... well I just finished reading the new year's editorial from the daily yomiuri newspaper. Something I was told a while back about the japanese style of argumentation now seems to have been right on the money. Here is a quick rundown... read it for yourself if you like (the new year's day editorial is in two parts).

I followed along through the whole thing (thanks in large part to rikaichan), as it talked about the unexpected beginning of the population decline, and some of the consequences.

The writer says that women being properly welcomed in the workplace might mean a small decrease in fertility rates (despite statistics showing the opposite to be true), but the increase in workforce would help to offset shrinking numbers of workers. Sure, I can dig that.

The writer suggests that goverment investing in hedge funds might be necessary, but that there are long-term economic consequences in becoming a profit-obsessed investor. I'm with him there too.

Energy conservation and conservation technologies will help preserve the Japanese economy, and must be considered at the individual level. Absolutely!

International cooperation will be very important for Japan in the coming era, though all illusions of an EU-like ASEAN should be quickly disgarded, as China and other Asian nations do not share the same ideologies as Japan as regard human rights, among other things. I can't disagree.

Therefore, the author argues, Japan must hurry to rearm itself, and should not wait on promises of constitutional reform, he concludes. WTF?


What that person told me and a captive audience of JETs was that japanese argumentation just doesn't progress like western argumentation. The thesis is often not presented until the end, and not well supported. Often times the very last sentence is the only meaningful one. The rest of the time, the author spends proving himself a skillful writer or a logical or trustworthy bloke by other means.
I snickered at this idea with everyone else, and thought "bullshit", but this article seems to bear out those assertions. Who'da guessed?

I (heart) nabe.

As per "year of the stupid dog", I want to cook more and better food this year. Right now, I'm making my second ever nabe from scratch. Nabe is short for Donabe, meaning clay-pot. It's basically just a bunch of stuff thrown into soup stock... though not quite soup. The focus is on the bits and pieces, not on the broth.

This time it's maitake mushrooms, black cloud mushrooms (kikurage), nameko (another, slimy variety of mushrooms), konnyaku (uh, a weird gel made from special potatoes), and little fried dough balls I made from lotus root and nagaimo (long potato?). It's got to simmer just a little bit longer before I can get into it, but it smells great.

This is a recipe from a magazine-like cookbook I bought last week called "anytime nabe". I'm looking forward to making another 10 or so of the recipes in the book. The rest are meaty.

the TSE, some preliminary observations

The Tokyo stock exchange is weirrd. Well, you know... not weird, just differently-abled.

For example, the 2,351 stocks listed on the TSE are broken into three parts: the 1st and 2nd sections plus "mothers". The 1st section is built of the blue chips of japan... the Topix index documents strictly this section and comprised of just under 1700 different stocks, over 70% of the market. The 2nd section is a little nebulous, but is made up of 500 or so smaller cap, or illiquid stocks. The remaining index, Mothers (ya got me), is the wild west of the TSE, with 151 listed companies as of last market close. Different listing criteria means much smaller, much more volatile stocks.
But volatility is in the eye of the beholder. The TSE has a couple of special rules to prevent volatility, most notably "daily price limits". Generally a stock's value cannot change from the previous day's closing price by more than a certain amount. That value is a static number based on the closing day's price. For example if the stock finished the prior trading day between 10,000 and 20,000 yen, the following day's tading value will be restricted to a range between 2,000 more and 2,000 less than the previous day's close. So some stocks can't move more than 10% in a given day, while others can move as much as 20%. Consequently, the biggest moving stocks are always restricted by their daily limits... if you watch that kind of thing.

As I study up to find out more about how the TSE works, I'm finding out a lot about how the American markets work too. I didn't come into this a total rube though.

(how's that for breadth of subject matter!)

retire the pounds away!

I watched bobby tangle with akebono last night. And it occured to me... akebono's an embarassment. In fact, on a rival network, a comedienne used his name alone as a joke.

comedienne:"akebono"
audience: (hearty laugh)

Akebono, Konishiki, Musashimaru... all three of them suffer from two big problems. They can't find decent post-sumo careers, and they can't seem to shake their working weight. Almost all of the top level japanese sumo wrestlers lose a ton of weight once they stop fighting, and continue their careers as stocky-firmly-built dudes. These dudes are just big old sacks of lard though, sweatin' and dyin' at a rate no one should.

I say it a lot in different places, but weight control is just a given here. Enjoying food is not a vice in the least, but being fat is. Precisely the reverse of christian-american thought.